After he was imprisoned at Huntsville in 1977 for assault with a deadly weapon, Clark signed up for an art class. He drew with green, black and red ball point pens on any scrap of paper he could find — envelopes to prison menus. He described his gladiators and cosmic visions with razor-sharp outlines, covering every millimeter of the surface with the color inks.

"If anybody knows anything about my art, they know about my planets," he explained once. "I know they are out there because I've been there. Every night when I go to bed, I travel in my spaceship going to all the places I put on these papers."

Clark went to prison more than once, but after his final release he made Houston his home.

On July 13, Clark, 69, was shot in the arm and abdomen by two home invaders. He was admitted to Ben Taub Hospital, where he remained in a coma and on life support until his death Saturday.

Clark was born in Bartlett, near Temple, in 1936, dropped out of school in the seventh grade and soon became known as the Magnificent Pretty Boy. He adopted the moniker, he said, when "a girl told me I was pretty and started giving me money and then I started gambling pretty good."

"For 41 years before I came to prison, I lived wrong every day of my life," he told the Houston Chronicle in 1991. "And then I turn around and shoot a fool who deserved it." The "fool" had tried to run off with Clark's gambling take, he said. "But I had done so much wrong in the past, I figured it was just my turn (for prison)."

Artist William Steen, a former Houston resident, found Clark's work in 1989 in the Huntsville prison art show and became his agent. Clark's work has been exhibited by Hirschl & Adler Galleries in New York, at Houston's Project Row Houses and in the traveling exhibit of folk art Passionate Visions of the American South organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art. Critics gave him a place alongside other self-taught artists like Frank Jones, who had also been an inmate in Huntsville.

"I can't draw nothing but things that come out of my mind," Clark said. He believed that "there are many galaxies that our world has never come in contact with yet," he said. "But one day when we do, I'm going to be up there looking down at everybody saying, 'Here I am, the Magnificent Pretty Boy.' "